On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Austerity is part of how fascism works to defeat us all.

From CBC News:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kia-canada-car-sales-1.7063216

Considering that we need to pick up the pace of EV adoption across multiple countries, who else is doing this, and in how many countries?

Following up a bit on local comics creators and suchlike.

One friendly acquaintance of mine from the long-dissolved Orléans Comic Jam sessions, Dominic Bercier, has a Kickstarter fundraiser/project going at the moment. Timing might be tight for you if you're interested, I understand that...

Anyway, here's the link.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/renaissancebp/exclusive-holiday-card-delivered-by-santa

If you're interested in Dominic's published work to date more generally:

https://www.bercier.ca/

The local publisher that Dominic's more recently tying in with:

https://pressesrenaissancepress.ca/

Well, it wasn't a deputation. That's apparently not until next month, which is going to...not complicate at least one other appointment at the end of November. I am going to have to deal with lost income for however long I have to be ready to deliver it on that day, I think.

What did happen was further training, as well as face time directly with three city councillors. Leiper, Troster and Devine. Also, contact with some of the staffers of other members of city council.

Focus is still on mental health, poverty reduction and housing, because the city budget-building for 2024 is underway, and the staff's under direction to keep the rate increase to 2.5 %.

What I could have felt better about? More than a half-dozen of the 50 attendees masking up, for one. Seeing working air purifiers in the room for another. Neither of those things happened, though, so...

I just brought a copy from the local library to the house for study, on the recommendation of doc_paradise. I figure to start reading it over the next couple of days.

I managed to last about 20-30 minutes. I wasn't able to cover the animation side of CSP's toolkit because I don't use those parts. (I know that others do, and I'd like to find a Mac user somewhere in Ottawa who does for the next time.)

I know I didn't cover more than a fraction of what that software is capable of in that twenty minutes. There are hundreds - thousands? - of tutorials in static web-page and video formats to take one into more depth. These are being created and updated even now. I need to set aside time to practice with CSP regularly.

The need to pay my bills ASAP is cutting into time I could be spending on learning to be a better artist/designer/illustrator and earning an honest living from those skills.

I'm listening to The House on CBC Radio One this morning as I type this paragraph. Upstairs in the laundry room, I've started cleaning my bedding. I expect that laundry chore to take up most of the waking hours of this morning.

The job search also continues, yes, even on weekends. No, I don't record in my job search diary every single e-mailed job alert I'm subscribed to via the federal job bank, Indeed, Workopolis, Jobillico, assorted private firms and federal agencies. After nine months, I'm already at 250 pages in Apple Numbers-formatted entries in said job search diary, and that would probably triple the number of entries to keep track of. At minimum.

Noting that today is International Human Rights Day. I wish I could donate to organizations I consider worthy of support right now. One more reason why I continue the job search.

Also, it leads to thinking of Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem. Macklem recently made comments to the effect that bringing the inflation rate under control again requires some of us to be unemployed. Or so many of us seem to be reading between his messages' lines at the moment.

Well, now it seems that the Pandemic changed the national conversations about society. Right?

In the first months of the Pandemic, a lot of us found ourselves (staying) out of work whether we liked it or not. Not because of our ability to work, or willingness to work, or lack of either. It happened because working in ways that were "normal" pre-Pandemic had become hazardous to the health of most of us. At least until we figured out masking, vaccines and so on. Unemployment had become a duty to our neighbours and our country/countries instead of a survival problem to be solved.

So, if unemployment can become a duty for reasons of public health and safety - which it had - we had things like the CERB programme and the modified (un)employment insurance programme to help many of us cope with carrying it out. Not everyone who needed that help got it, not everyone who got it needed it. That's being looked into, with varying degrees of good faith depending on which level of government in which part(s) of the country are looking into it.

And now, to deal with the renewed "scourge" of inflation...Macklem argued about a week ago - as I write this - to the effect that some of us were going to have to either become or stay unemployed due to the interest rate hikes he had the Bank of Canada put into place in order to deal with that.

Wonderful.

So here we are. Macklem has, in my opinion, reopened the door about Universal Basic Income as an idea that it's finally time to put into action.

More on this as I get through today, I think.

It's nowhere near UBI. It's still something more than we knew to expect before in the present context.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-workers-benefit-eligibility-boost-pbo/

I'm seeing this from multiple credible sources in science fiction and fantasy fandoms.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/harris-de-lint-recovery-fund

During my exercise/mental health walk, I found a credit card issued by a Colombian bank on the sidewalk of a surburban street in my city this morning. I'm not going to say where in the city, which bank, which credit card brand, for obvious reasons. Anyway, I dropped it off at the local fire station, and the firefighters who took it off my hands will pass it along to the police, and hopefully it gets dealt with as needed from there.

The oddness of it was just seeing the thing at all. Granted that Ottawa's a national capital city, so people from all over the planet are going to visit - or live, for months to years at a time, temporarily - and it was still odd to see a credit card in any language other than English or French.